Founders' Keeper (A David and Martin Yerxa Thriller - Book 1) Read online

  A reporter was standing outdoors with the Chesapeake Bay Bridge at her back. The image shifted almost immediately to footage recorded earlier in the day; a middle-aged man with bony shoulders and dyed-blonde hair stood on the bridge a few yards beyond the yellow police line, talking animatedly to several police officers. The next shot showed the same man being interviewed by reporters. Text at the bottom of the screen identified him as Chris Schrade, the Anne Arundel County Executive.

  David shook his head, recalling what the cop had told him that morning about the redundant police lines.

  As he spoke to reporters, Schrade’s face looked grave but determined. “I’m as outraged as the rest of the nation. What happened here was tragic and disturbing. Deke Jacobsen was a loving father, a devoted husband, and a proud Marylander, and I promise that neither myself nor any of the law enforcement officials of this county will rest until his killer is brought to justice.”

  David pulled out his phone and flipped again to the photograph of the double police lines. Then he made his way backward and forward through the day’s photo album, trying again to identify what it was about the scene that was bothering him. In one of the photos, Lauren stood off to one side of the shot, and he found himself lingering on that picture. He realized this and abruptly set his phone face down on the bar.

  He felt a tap on his shoulder, and turned to find the young attorney who had been watching him as he walked into the bar. She had reddish-blonde hair and a lovely, round face. Dimples formed high up on her cheeks as she smiled at him.

  “Sorry to interrupt your alone time over here,” she said. “But my friend and I have a bet we’re hoping you’ll help us settle.”

  It took him a second to detach his thoughts from Lauren and the investigation. “All right,” he said. He waited for her to continue, holding her eyes and not glancing over at her friend.

  She laughed, suddenly nervous, and she looked back at her companion—her smile broadening more than David would have thought possible.

  “She thinks you’re in technology,” the attorney said as her eyes returned to his. “Like maybe you run an Internet startup or something like that. I think you’re some kind of artist—a photographer or a graphic designer.”

  “What do you win if you’re right?”

  “If I’m closer, she has to buy us both a drink. But if she’s right, I have to buy you and her a drink.”

  He nodded slowly and held her gaze. “Why don’t you and I just leave instead?”

  She looked confused for a moment, and then she cocked her head and laughed. “Excuse me?”

  “We can go to your place or mine, it doesn’t matter to me.”

  She took a small step back from him. “Are you serious right now?”

  He looked at her plainly. “I’m going to finish this beer and then I’m going to leave. If you want to leave with me, I’d like that. If you’d rather not, I’ll understand.”

  The attorney stared at him for another few seconds, then she snorted and turned away from him. As she rejoined her friend, David turned back to the bar and sat quietly, drinking his beer.

  When he’d finished it, he stood to leave and dropped a few bills on the countertop.

  “What’s all this?” Steve said, looking at the cash.

  “I’d like to buy the two women sitting at the bar another glass of wine.”

  “You mean those two?” Steve asked, gesturing over David’s shoulder.

  He turned just in time to see one of the attorneys—the one he hadn’t met—walk past and flash him a knowing grin and a slightly bewildered shake of her head. Her friend with the reddish-blonde hair was trailing a few steps behind.

  “All right,” she said, stopping next to him. She held his eyes and said, “We’ll go to my place.”

  Ninety minutes later, she smiled as she watched David dress himself at the foot of her bed.

  “You’re seriously going to leave?” she said, shaking her head and laughing. “Just like that?”

  “I have a lot of work to do tomorrow,” he said as he sat down on the edge of her bed and tied his shoes. “But I had a nice time tonight.”

  “A lot of work tomorrow. Okay.” She kept shaking her head at him, but not angrily. “Which reminds me—what do you do? You never told me. I mean, I don’t even know your name!”

  “It’s David,” he said. “And I’m an FBI agent.”

  That drew another big laugh. “Right. So are you going to call me, David the FBI agent?”

  He stood up from her bed. “No.”

  She held onto her smile for a moment, but then frowned when she saw he wasn’t joking. “No?” she said.

  “No, I’m not going to call you.”

  At home a short time later, David made his way upstairs.

  His house was a squat, two-story brick walkup with no basement and only a single bathroom on the second floor. He owned no carpet or rugs, and had few personal effects apart from some family photos his mother had hung around the house when he’d bought it years before. The main downstairs living space was composed of a couple matching pieces of Ikea furniture, a television, and a baby grand piano. There was also a study that contained a desk and laptop, a reading chair, and David’s books, most of which were stacked on the ground. At the back of the house was a narrow kitchen and breakfast table, and beyond this was a square backyard and patio boxed in on two sides by the walls of the larger adjacent houses. The patio contained a weatherproof table and chairs David never used.

  He stopped when he reached the second floor landing and let out a deep breath. He hadn’t enjoyed ending things with the attorney the way he had, but after similar encounters he’d learned that being blunt was the surest way to prevent his companion from ever trying to contact him again.

  Straight ahead was the guest room where his father would sleep while he was in town, and on a bedside table sat a photograph of David’s mother Angela. He stepped into the room and picked up the photograph.

  In it, Angela Yerxa was crouched in front of the small garden behind her and Martin’s row house in Philadelphia. She was smiling, a soil-smudged glove poised at her brow as she wiped sweat away on the back of her wrist. She held a cigarette between her fingers. With her other hand she raised a gardening trowel toward the camera, playfully warding off the photographer.

  David stood holding the picture, remembering his mother’s smile and her breathy laugh and the way the tops of the buildings had looked from her twelfth-story hospital room. He thought about the attorney he’d spent the evening with, and about the things his mother had said to him a few days before her death. And for a moment, he also thought about Lauren Carnicero.

  He set his mother’s photograph down and made his way back downstairs to her piano. He took a seat on its bench. Angela Yerxa had tried to teach her son to play when he was a boy, but it didn’t take. He still didn’t know how to play, and he knew he’d never learn.

  He touched a key and listened to the note reverberate through his quiet house. It soon faded away.

  Chapter 11

  THE MAN YANKED the necktie free from his shirt collar and tossed it toward the bed. It streaked over the edge of the mattress and landed on the floor, coiling down onto itself.

  He didn’t notice. The remote was already in his hands. He flipped through the cable news channels and stopped on MSNBC. He stood frozen just a few feet from the television screen, watching intently as the talking heads discussed Senator Dennis Jacobsen’s death. They related the highlights of Jacobsen’s “too-brief” political career as both a state legislator and member of the United States Senate. They spent much more time discussing the family he had left behind.

  When the conversation turned to the gruesome nature of Jacobsen’s death, the man held his breath—waiting.

  He did not hear what he wanted to hear. No mention of the snake or messages left at the scene. No reference to the other murders.

  He sighed and shook his head, his eyes falling to the floor. He told himself to b
e patient.

  For a few minutes he flipped among the other news channels. He was fairly certain none would provide new details on Jacobsen’s murder, and he was proved right; different pundits blathered nonsense at one another, vomiting up the same tired bromides before welcoming PR-hungry “expert” guests who could help them devour and digest the publicized facts more completely. The man’s ears perked up when one of these guests—a law professor at Johns Hopkins and a college classmate of Jacobsen’s—talked about his old friend’s passion for public health, as well as the national and legal ramifications of his proposed sodium- and sugar-limiting legislation concerning fast food restaurants. But the program’s host quickly shifted the conversation toward the dead senator’s college years.

  The man scowled with frustration. Eventually he took a seat on the edge of the bed and set the remote control down at his side. Though the television was still on, he’d stopped paying attention to it. His mind was elsewhere.

  Be patient, he told himself. You knew it would take time.

  When he heard a familiar voice, the man turned his attention back to the television. The late replay of Philip Goodman’s cable news program had begun, and the man watched intently as the host made his way back and forth across the set stage, holding up his pocket edition of the Constitution.

  The man scowled when the audience burst into a chorus of cheers. It’s all just a game to you people, isn’t it? he thought. An entertainment?

  He watched for another minute and then began to unbutton his dress shirt. He slipped it off his shoulders and draped it over a chair, where it was soon joined by his pants, socks, and underwear. The man walked naked to the bathroom and turned the shower on as hot as it would go. He stepped into the nearly scalding water and held his elbows as it pinkened his skin.

  Tomorrow, he thought. Or maybe the day after. But soon. The wheels will begin to turn for them very soon.

  And if they didn’t, he had ways of addressing that problem.

  Be patient, he told himself again.

  Wednesday, September 6

  Chapter 12

  “YO, DAVID! OUR boy’s over this way.”

  Bill Conway waved from the side of the house.

  David stepped onto the grassy lawn and felt his shoes sink half an inch into the damp earth. He looked around: rural Delaware, and not another house for a quarter mile. Just flat marshland and reedy patches of forest. The air was humid and soft from the recent rain, and he left his jacket in the back of his car.

  Although there were other vehicles parked on the unpaved driveway alongside David’s Lincoln, there were no detectives, police officers, or forensic examiners in sight.

  He walked toward Bill Conway and the two shook hands.

  “Wait’ll you see this guy,” Conway said, chuckling as he gestured toward the back of the house. “Holy shit.”

  David had felt the older agent’s tension in his handshake, and he knew Conway’s joking was mostly nerves. The two walked around the house toward the back of the property.

  “Where’s Marty?” Conway asked, looking back over David’s shoulder as though the elder Yerxa was lurking somewhere among the assembled cars. “I heard he’s chipping in.”

  “On his way. He should be here soon.”

  After talking with his father, David had called Lauren to let her know she didn’t have to make the trip to Delaware. “Martin and I will handle this one,” he’d told her. “We should be back at Quantico by noon.”

  He knew she was anxious to join them, but he wanted a little time alone with his father.

  Behind the house, the lawn stretched nearly a hundred yards to the edge of the woods. The recent rain had brought out the scent of freshly mowed grass, and David could see a few police officers, a handful of forensic technicians, and men who were undoubtedly township homicide detectives milling a good fifty feet from the yellow police tent erected at the edge of the forest line.

  Keeping their distance, he thought. He pulled out his phone and took a photograph of the scene.

  As he and Conway approached the police tent, David felt his cell phone buzz. He saw the call was coming in from the Quantico switchboard and assumed it was Lauren. He decided he’d call her back.

  When they neared the tent, the cops and detectives quit their nervous chatter. They stared silently as Conway lifted the yellow flap and the two stepped inside.

  At first glance, David couldn’t separate the body from the contraption. He saw two round wooden pillars buried in the ground and secured by metal stakes. The pillars were connected by two horizontal planks that floated four feet above the ground and bound the man by his neck and wrists.

  As his mind brought what he was seeing into focus, David felt as though all the blood in his body was drawing toward his core, leaving his head and arms tingling.

  It was a pillory, he realized—the kind of prop children stuck their heads and wrists through to pose for gag pictures at Colonial Williamsburg. The apparatus was clamped around the lifeless body like a set of wooden mandibles. The dead man’s face and hands were white as milk, but behind the whiteness, where all the blood had drained away, David could see a blush of purple like a bruise beneath an apple’s skin. The man’s tongue had lolled out of his mouth, and blood had stained the wood below his face and wrists. The blood had also dripped down onto the grass, leaving round, glistening patches that resembled oversized cigarette burns.

  David stood looking at the dead man for a full minute without moving or speaking. Then he stepped carefully around the body, examining the corpse and the apparatus that held it. He could see open wounds encircling the man’s forearms and neck. The body’s drooping weight had rubbed against the holes in the wood, sloughing away the flesh.

  “Those wrist and neck holes?” Conway said, doing his best to maintain an even tone. “They’re rimmed with razor blades.”

  David could tell he wanted to shout it. FUCKING RAZOR BLADES!

  “Do we know what kind of wood this is?” he asked.

  Conway furrowed his brow at him. “Our people say balsa,” he answered after a long pause.

  “Balsa,” David repeated.

  “That’s a funny thing to ask about, right off the bat.”

  “Why?”

  Conway grunted as through the answer to this question was obvious, and David added, “Funny questions lead to funny answers that get us thinking about things we may not have considered.”

  He turned away, leaving Conway with a confused look on his face, and stepped closer to the structure. He examined it closely. He knew balsa was one of the lightest woods, and for reasons he couldn’t explain his mind recalled again the blood on the bridge railing. He took a photograph of the wood.

  “You figure he was standing there a long time before he died?” Conway asked, shuffling nervously from one foot to the other as David made his way around the body.

  David shook his head. “Twenty minutes. Not much more.”

  “How do you know?”

  He bent closer to the corpse and pointed at the man’s hands. “See how high these wrist holes are positioned? Up a few inches higher than his head? He couldn’t have held that pose for long.”

  He stepped back from the body and looked at Conway. “How’d we find out about him?”

  “Delaware State Police reported it to our Wilmington office early this morning. They got a call from the local cops, who got a tip from this guy’s son. I guess it was the kid’s birthday yesterday. He’s up in New York, and when he didn’t hear from his dad he got worried and asked the police to come check on him.”

  “Does he know what they found here?”

  “Who? The son?” Conway shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m sure NYPD sent some people over to talk with him.”

  David turned back to the body and stared at it for a few seconds, trying not to imagine what it would be like to get a visit like that. “Show me the rest,” he said.

  Chapter 13

  THE OPEN AIR tasted sweet to David after th
e still putrescence of the police tent. He could smell pine needles along with freshly mown grass, and he noticed several crows circling overhead, watching the activity below.

  “Let’s get everyone off this lawn,” he said to Conway. “It rained last night and this morning. There are shoe prints we can use back here.”

  As the two walked along the perimeter of the property and approached the house—a white Dutch Colonial with some stone-and-mortar details on one outer wall—Conway called out David’s instructions to the assembled forensic technicians and local homicide investigators.

  “Tell me about the victim,” David said.

  “Mitchell Cosgrove. Fifty-one years old. Head of the Milton Water Department.”

  “Is Milton the one I passed through on my way in?”

  Conway nodded. “Old shipbuilding town. Inlet access to the Atlantic through Glover’s Ditch. Mostly long-time residents. Some summer tourists, but never much action.”

  David followed him onto the house’s rear deck and through the back door. They stepped into an updated kitchen with black granite countertops and a new Wolf range and oven, everything gleaming and disinfected.

  The two agents walked down a hallway to a study at the front of the house. A massive wooden desk dominated the room. It was covered with letters, pen-marked printouts, and notebooks, as well as a rectangular white package.

  David looked at the package and then turned to the study’s lone window, which looked out on the front yard and circular driveway. A man dressed in olive slacks and a navy windbreaker was climbing out of a gray Chevy sedan.

  David watched as his father set his insulated coffee mug on the roof of his car—the same dented coffee mug he’d had for at least a decade. Martin reached into his back pocket and pulled out his notepad—as David knew he would—and took a few seconds to review the preliminary information he’d received concerning the crime scene. After a few seconds he replaced the notepad, retrieved his coffee mug, and made his way toward the house.